In a typical online merchandising environment, users can search for available items with several keywords related to the items. For example, a user may be able to search information about a specific item by providing a search engine with information such as a name of the item, a manufacture name of the item, and/or characteristics of the item. However, as the size of the online merchandising environment has increased, so has the number of available items and information related to the available items. One aspect of this growth is that a typical search result is simply too large for the user to browse.
Oftentimes, the search results can be sorted so that the user is presented with the potentially most relevant item for which the user is searching. In the event that the search results are too large, users can submit additional search criteria or alternative search criteria in order to reduce the size of the search results. To enable users to easily accomplish this, some search engines provide additional search tools that facilitate the display of pre-categorization. The pre-categorization is displayed along with the display of the search results and enables users to choose additional search criteria such as characteristics shared by numerous items or alternative search criteria of the search results.
Although the inclusion of pre-categorization can improve a general searching experience, users still can have difficulty utilizing the pre-categorization to locate a specific item since a set of search categories are predefined for display before any search is conducted. For example, even if the search results would rather be pre-categorized by colors in order to provide more meaningful categorization, the data entries in the search results may not be grouped by colors unless the color is one of the search categories predefined for display. Further, the order of the search categories within a display page is also predefined, and, thus, the search categories may not be dynamically reordered based on information obtained from the search results.